A Week of Unsettled, Unsettling Weather – Issue #57
Unveiling the alarming climate shifts: Rising ocean temperatures, unpredictable storms, and a depleted carbon budget
The Big Picture
In 2016, James Hansen warned us that the North Atlantic was fragile. Melting ice sheets, a paper co-written by the climate scientist had said, would place a freshwater lens over neighbouring oceans. This would result in the ocean retaining extra heat, further melting the underside of large ice sheets, resulting in them releasing more fresh water. He said all this additional water could slow and then shut down two key ocean currents that move heat from the tropics to the Atlantic.
“If these ocean conveyors were to be impacted, this could create much greater temperature differences between the tropics and the North Atlantic, driving “super storms stronger than any in modern times”, said the paper.
Are those words coming true? All through last week, the earth behaved in anomalous ways. Temperatures in the North Atlantic spiked abruptly, getting 0.5 degrees warmer than usual. In tandem, forests burned sooner – and more furiously – in Canada. Antarctic ice fell to its lowest expanse.
News from the tropics is unsettling as well. Even in the tropics, the Atlantic is much warmer than usual as are most oceans right now.
What is going on? Warming oceans transfer energy into the atmosphere, resulting in bigger storms than usual. A warmer-than-usual Arabian sea, for instance, has produced cyclone Biparjoy, the landfall of which on the Gujarat coast seems imminent. When this happens, it will be only the third cyclone in the last 60 years to make landfall on India's western coast. And its track has hardly been straightforward - surprising observers by pivoting away from the well established trajectory toward Yemen, Oman and Somalia, and rather moving parallel to the Indian coast as it intensified. The culprit, prima facie, is the heat and its distribution in the Arabian Sea.
But why have oceans warmed so abruptly this year? Has some tipping point been reached? This report in New Scientist has some answers regarding the North Atlantic – El Nino is one immediate trigger. Another, of course, is our emissions, which continue to grow apace.
Unsettling news came from other planetary weather systems as well. Wildfires in Australia are now producing fire tornadoes, says a new book. In tandem, the earth’s upper atmosphere seems to be cooling, with implications for global jet streams and the ozone layer.
In all this, our species continued with business as usual. The world, we learnt this week, has exhausted half of its carbon budget to keep warming below 1.5 degrees in just the last three years.
News of the week
These are days of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, one watches climate scientists slipping into varying degrees of stunned disbelief. On the other, a world that still thinks it has time – and can afford to ignore these issues, or change without taking hard calls.
The Indian experience is telling. We have lived through another week when the country, climate vulnerabilities notwithstanding, has undermined its ecological foundations. New coal mines continue to come up. The country continues to harass climate defenders. One could go on and on... and on.
In the past few months, we have seen heatwaves, forest-fires, aseasonal rains and atypical temperatures. Delhi, remember, touched 18 degrees one morning in May. Last week too, this chaos continued. The monsoon -- late this year – has finally arrived. So has, however, Biparjoy. Despite the volte face pulled by the IMD, two weeks after its normal arrival date over the Indian mainland, the onset of the monsoon seems hardly a done deal and progress has been sketchy. Over 80% of India's districts have received either deficient or no rains in the first weeks of the season.
Our responses are unequal to the task. Tweaks in FAME subsidies are spooking EV companies. The country now faces a milk shortage – partly due to Covid, partly due to dairy mismanagement, partly due to inflation; and partly due to lumpy skin disease which in turn is being exacerbated by climate change. In tandem comes news that the government wants to recalibrate its measurement of socio-economic markers. This comes on the heels of its decision to drop anaemia measurements, weaken NREGA, and stop teaching evolution/periodic table to all students. All these measures reduce Indian society’s capacity to respond to climate change.
There are wins too – like a spike in unsubsidised solar installations, continuing interest in pumped storage projects (see this announement by Torrent Power and this one by NHPC) – but as our book of the week shows below, the losses run so much deeper.
In other news, India continues to push out rosy projections for green hydrogen. Rosneft wants to set up a greenfield refinery in India. Adani continues to climb out of its hole. Its debt numbers are improving. One more report says it will slow down on M&A.
Only a few countries seem to be getting their acts together. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US is seeing manufacturing jobs return to the country. Read this longread in Canary. So is China. The country, as we have noted in the past, is emerging as an global EV juggernaut. A book on how it achieved its feat is sorely needed – as is a book on how the middle kingdom built its high-speed rail network.
All we have, for now, is this 2012 New Yorker story on how China’s high speed rail network came about, and this column last week in the WSJ describing how China built its EV industry. As in solar, the US squandered its lead in EV batteries. By 2009, China began subsidising buyers of EVs. In tandem, the government switched public procurement of taxis and buses to EVs and, as the WSJ says, provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. There was also a focus on localisation. To get subsidies, cars had to be locally made, with components manufactured in China. Even with these measures, however, interest in EVs stayed low till Tesla entered China.
That triggered public curiosity – to frame this loosely – and created an outcome where “China’s EV industry went from a niche industrial policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies,” writes WSJ. “Much of this happened while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions. When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China.””
Three things are interesting here. One, that a Tesla needed to enter – to give the market its boost. Two, the capacities China has built in EVs – which look like they will rival the country’s global hegemony in EVs. And three, through measures like FAME, KABIL and PLI, India is following the Chinese template in critical emerging sectors. Will it work – or will it, as Bloomberg concludes, deepen India’s dependence on China (as companies import assembly lines as opposed to components).
A forthcoming report in CarbonCopy will get into that question soon.
As this global battle continues, the world is splitting between winners and losers. South Korea is making battery investments in Indonesia but, with the bulk of Indonesia nickel production and refining controlled by Chinese companies, is struggling to construct a supply chain that fulfils US demands for batteries free of Chinese ownership of key components. Brazil is seeing deindustrialisation. Mexico, however, is gaining from US plans to reshore supply chains.
Other news. Norway wants to extract battery minerals through deep sea mining. It’s readying plans to open an area of ocean nearly the size of Germany.
The species that will survive climate change
In the journal Cell, researchers report that octopuses are able to edit genetic information to quickly resculpt those brains when confronted with changes in their environment – like warming oceans.
Climate long-reads of the week
The absconding Sandesara brothers are flourishing in Nigeria’s oil sector. “As newly elected President Bola Tinubu sets ambitious targets for Nigeria’s hydrocarbons sector, companies created by the brothers, Nitin and Chetan Sandesara, seem poised for an increasingly prominent role — especially as international oil giants such Shell Plc and ExxonMobil Corp. retreat from the West African country,” reports Bloomberg.
Colombia has a hippo problem. (Nature)
Against The Sea: Rising Sea Levels In Ratnagiri Turn Farm Lands Into Mangrove Forests. (Indiaspend)
Why melting glaciers are causing both drought and floods in the Himalayas. (Scroll.in)
And then, there is this eye-popping report. “Italy helped a retailer open chocolate and gelato stores across Asia. The United States offered a loan for a coastal hotel expansion in Haiti. Belgium backed the film “La Tierra Roja,” a love story set in the Argentine rainforest. And Japan is financing a new coal plant in Bangladesh and an airport expansion in Egypt. Funding for the five projects totaled $2.6 billion, and all four countries counted their backing as so-called “climate finance”... The four countries defended their programs as sound. Japanese officials consider the power and airport projects green because they include cleaner technology or sustainable features. A U.S official said the hotel project counts because it includes stormwater controls and hurricane protection measures. A Belgian government spokesman defended counting the grant for the rain-forest movie as climate finance because the film touches on deforestation, a driver of climate change. An Italian government official said Italy aims to consider climate in all of its financing but did not elaborate on how the chocolate stores met that goal.”
From Rich nations say they're spending billions to fight climate change. Some money is going to strange places. (Reuters)
What if We’re Thinking About Inflation All Wrong? New Yorker profiles economist Isabella Weber.
This country’s love affair with air conditioning shows a Catch 22 of climate change. (CNN)8. ‘Things not going well’: plan to return cheetahs to India under fire after six die within months. The Guardian takes a look at India’s Cheetah reintroduction.
The uncomfortable reality of life on Earth after we breach 1.5°C. (New Scientist)
On the ecological consequences of the destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam. (Scientific American)
Book(s) of the week
Now comes news that Ben Okri is out with a new novel – Tiger Work – which blends fantasy and magic to imagine the consequences of climate change.
But that is not our book of the week. That title goes to a book released yesterday in Bangalore – Marginlands: India’s landscapes on the brink, by reporter/traveller/national geographic explorer Arati Kumar Rao. We have all the answers we need, she said at the book’s launch. We need to do is listen better to the land – and what it’s telling us – and draft our policies accordingly. Arati practices slow journalism, immersing herselves in these reports, almost gathering these stories osmotically.
We have just started reading this book – and it is truly mesmerising. Add it to your must-read lists.